Jan Marcus, Mathias Huebener
In designing education systems, policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by increasing education efficiency: The time in high school is reduced by one year while the total number of instruction hours is left unchanged. Employing administrative data on all pupils in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study first indicators of the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that the shortening of the high school track length by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by 10 months. We show that grade repetition rates double for pupils in the final years before graduation and that this effect is not quickly fading out over time. However, the number of students that graduate with university entrance qualifications not affected. The results indicate the reform’s success in reducing graduation age, though it stays behind its full potential benefits for labour markets, pension schemes and fertility because of higher grade repetition rates.
JEL-Classification: I28;D04
Keywords: Grade Repetition, Graduation Rates, Learning Intensity, Difference-in-Differences, Education Efficiency, Graduation Age
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